Spoon Records and Mute are delighted to announce the release of Can – The Lost Tapes, the long awaited box set of unreleased studio, soundtrack and live material.

The Lost Tapes, out on 18 June 2012, was curated by Irmin Schmidt and Daniel Miller, compiled by Irmin Schmidt and Jono Podmore, and edited by Jono Podmore.

When the legendary Can studio in Weilerswist was sold to the German Rock N Pop Museum, they bought everything, including the army mattresses that covered the walls for sound protection, and relocated it to Gronau.

Whilst dismantling the studio, master tapes were found and stored in the Spoon archive. With barely legible labeling, no one was sure what was on these until Irmin Schmidt and long time collaborator Jono Podmore started to go through over 30 hours of music.

The final cut of tracks, dating from 1968-1977, features studio material recorded at Schloss Nörvenich and Can Studio, Weilerswist with the Can line up of Holger Czukay on bass, Michael Karoli on guitars, Jaki Liebezeit on drums and Irmin Schmidt on keyboards, and on most tracks, vocals from Malcolm Mooney or Damo Suzuki.

Can was formed by ex-student of Stockhausen Irmin Schmidt, who, fired by the sounds of Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa abandoned his career in classic music to form a group which could utilise and transcend all boundaries of ethnic, electronic experimental and modern classical music.

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Its funny cause I looked up at the sky last night and saw it was a full moon night. Now, our dear friend AZ has sent us today a Jon Hassell piece called ‘Last night the moon came’. So here you are – coming from the master himself, and for those of you who don’t know some trivia about Jon, here it is in a sentence, plus listen to this wonderful track… .Jon Hassell -”A childhood in Memphis, a classical conservatory education, composition and electronic music study with Stockhausen in Cologne; a passage through the New York minimalist sphere with Terry Riley, Reich, Glass; having a window opened onto the world’s music and a new approach to the trumpet via vocal master Pandit Pran Nath; a questioning and deconstruction of the European dichotomy between classical and popular, sacred and sensual; a pioneer of digital transformation and sampling – all of this led to Fourth World – the unique blend which Jon has described as “worldly music” to underline a more subtle equation at work and to discourage the simplistic labeling of “world,” “jazz,” “classical,” “minimal,” or “ambient”….

I have heard about Luciano Berio not because he was one of the most important modern experimental composers and electronic music pioneers ( among them Stockhausen, Piere Boulez, Steve Reich and John Cage.), but he was simply married to my wife`s cousin, Talia, a musicologist. The first thing I have heard from him, a guitar piece of a series of 18 solo instrument works called Sequenza. This one, the 11th was recorded in 1987.

Sequenza # 11